Something shocking happens in Gloria that anyone who sees the play should not give away. But let's say this before moving on: Even more shocking is the toxic interpersonal office environment that sets up the surprise in Dallas Theater Center's regional premiere of this 2015 play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

Even more extraordinary is how this show, while utterly devoid of politics and any mention of hot-button issues, takes audiences on an unpredictable, darkly clever journey to a simple and very human insight that may be exactly what our deeply polarized world needs to hear right now.

Drew Wall is Dean and Grace Montie is Ani in Dallas Theater Center's Gloria at the Wyly Theatre.

((Smiley N. Pool/Staff Photographer))

The carping is quick and lethal from the moment Dean (a desperate and despairing Drew Wall) races in, disheveled, late and hung over to his cubicle at the glossy, unnamed New York-based magazine where he works as an assistant to an unseen, distant editor down the hall.

Dean, a fact-checker named Lorin (played with a potent mix of anger and anguish by Michael Federico) and another assistant, Kendra (Satomi Blair, delivering fast-talking blizzards of words with conniving charm) see their dreams slip away as they age in jobs that are underpaid and underappreciated. Then there are the younger folks, Ani (Grace Montie) in the job Dean used to have, and the intern, Miles (Ryan Woods), not yet beaten down but on their way, and Gloria (an intense Leah Spillman), a longtime copy editor who threw a party the night before that becomes the subject of the day's conversation.

Satomi Blair portrays Kendra in a Dallas Theater Center performance of Gloria at the Wyly Theatre in Dallas.

((Smiley N. Pool/Staff Photographer))

Collectively, they're all needed to put out the magazine, but they're the most unwilling of teams. Each views life as a zero-sum game in which one person's loss is another person's gain, which means they try to lift themselves up by tearing each other down.

The nimble cast, under the feeling direction of Christie Vela, spars verbally, drawing blood, but with a whiff of lost humanity that alludes, ever so slightly and compellingly, to buried fears that propel the bitter take-downs. The bright fluorescent lights and white desks in Dahlia Al-Habieli's on-target set offer a blunt contrast to the inner darkness that roils these tormented souls. Aaron Johansen's stark lighting follows the characters around like an exterminator in search of bugs, leaving them no place to hide.

Jacobs-Jenkins, an Obie Award-winning MacArthur Fellow, was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama for this work. Comparisons can be made to the ruthless backstabbers in David Mamet's 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner, Glengarry Glen Ross, about desperate real estate agents, but Jacobs-Jenkins, while no sentimentalist, takes a similarly dark road to place where there's a glimmer of hope. That welcome twist is the biggest surprise of all.